Violeta Parra.

For Mother’s Day, I’ve been thinking about some of the powerful and provocative creative nonviolent activist work that mothers have done through the ages — and there is a lot of it. So much of popular history tells the stories of the men who “led” the charge in struggles, but my thoughts went to South America, and Chile in particular, because of the richness of the cultural methods used, and the leadership of mothers in the face of brutal and patriarchal regimes.

“You can’t have a revolution without songs,” read the banner behind Salvador Allende when he became president of Chile in 1970, highlighting the role of Nueva Canción (New Song) in the emergent resistance movements in South America. This style of musical resistance didn’t just include the voices of women, though one of its early proponents was Violeta Parra, a mother, who wrote the song “Gracias a la Vida.” Nueva Canción was intentionally used to unite and identify concerns of oppressed peoples, as it integrated native and rural musical instrumentation with urban and European styles to speak to ever larger communities. Only three years later, when Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile, his regime outlawed several instruments identified with Nueva Canción, recognizing and attempting to stop the powerful spread of political ideas, courage and resistance through music.

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Changing the world for good doesn’t depend on money, status, or political power. It hinges, instead, on ordinary people unleashing their creativity and gumption.

This is not an airy theory for Jack Healey. It’s something he has experienced throughout his life. The former executive director of Amnesty International USA took another opportunity to spread this news this past Monday night when he spoke to a group of students at DePaul University in Chicago.

His message to them: Shake off any powerlessness that might be holding you back from making a difference. At a time when the concern for human rights has been largely sidelined in the national conversation, tap your power to work for those rights in their most comprehensive sense: from jobs to justice. In short, take action for a world where everyone matters.

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Conflict and abuses against Burma’s ethnic minorities often gets looked over, not just by the international media, but also in Burma’s major cities like Rangoon. In central Burma, the fighting seems like a distant issue. Especially with such acute censorship of the media, the reality of the situation is often misunderstood and underestimated by people living outside the conflict areas.

Generation Wave, an activist group composed of hip hop singers, graffiti artists, poets and other hip urban youth, wants this mentality to change. Peace and an end to militarization not only concerns the Karen, Kachin, Shan, or other ethnic groups, it is something that affects all Burmese people. Last week they staged several actions in Rangoon as part of their new campaign “Let the Flowers Bloom, But Not Bullets.”

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On January 26, a group of activists with Organizing for Occupation (O4O), Housing is a Human Right and Occupy Wall Street interrupted another foreclosure action in Brooklyn with their singing. (Frida Berrigan reported on the first of these actions back in October.) As you can see from the above video, after selling only one house out of four, the auction was aborted and 39 people were arrested.

In an email interview with Karen Gargamelli, an attorney with Common Law who is involved with O4O, she explains why they have chosen this melodic tactic:

We sing because it is non-violent and because it is beautiful. We hope to confound the systems that evict New Yorkers (the courts) and the elected officials that refuse to regulate the big banks with loveliness.

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A checkpoint run by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at Baba Amr, a poor district in the southwestern part of Homs. Photo from Der Spiegel.

Say the words, “Free Syrian Army” in nearly any gathering of Syrian expatriates lately, and their faces break into wide smiles of appreciation. Say the same words to people in Syria, and they say, “They will liberate us.” This sentiment is growing all over Syria, as the defected soldiers that make up the FSA wage battle against their pro-regime counterparts. But will such optimism last?

Nearly 11 months into the Syrian uprising, ordinary civilians, once certain of the effectiveness of civil resistance, are losing hope. They turn to the FSA for protection. The world has been in awe of the Syrian revolution and its peaceful activists (“How brave!” “Such tenacity!”), who vow to oust the Assad regime once and for all, and the peaceful protests continue daily. However, many of these demonstrations are protected from Assad’s army and snipers by the FSA, where and when possible. The presence of the FSA at protest sites has re-energized protesters, who are coming out in increasing numbers even as the regime escalates its violence against them.

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For too many expatriate Africans living in the West, the phrase Occupied Nigeria raises scary images of U.S. or NATO warships bearing down in AFRICOM-commando fashion, reestablishing Eurocentric hegemony over the worlds’ fifth largest supplier of crude oil. Before these early days of 2012, we had barely heard news of the spreading Occupy hashtag on the continent that helped re-popularize mass nonviolent civilian resistance around the world last year. Now #Occupy Nigeria in just two short weeks has mobilized thousands in cities across the diverse West African country, along with support demonstrations (including some of those ex-pats) in London, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and elsewhere. The widespread strike by Nigerian oil workers continues to grow, as calls for an end to economic and political corruption gain momentum.

The short-term issue which birthed the network now being called Occupy Nigeria was the hastily-announced January 1, 2012 end of the federal fuel subsidies which had enabled average Nigerians to afford gas pumped from oil reserves on their own land. This resulted in an overnight 120 percent price increase, and an outburst of fury at decades of governmental collusion with the multi-billion dollar oil industry. The initial demands of the movement—to simply return to the status quo before 2012—were quickly followed up with calls for an end to the nepotism of politicians and an improvement in infrastructure. By the end of the first week of local protests, Nigerian police had killed at least ten activists, and a call went out for a nationwide, indefinite strike which would halt the Nigerian economy. Many mainstream professional associations joined the call, including the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association. Ongoing and intensified shut-downs promise to paralyze international oil supplies.

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On Saturday night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, just before the third act of Faust began, a man began yelling from the audience, “Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Wall Street!” It had neither the rhythm of a chant nor the participatory quality of the usual “mic check” that has been used to disrupt so much lately, interrupting public figures including Michele Bachmann, Scott Walker, and Barack Obama. (Maybe having the quorum for a mic check would have cost too many tickets.) It was first received with a boo from someone on the opposite side of the theater, but that was quickly drowned out by a round of applause—something like what a singer might receive at curtain call for a decent performance in a supporting role. The protester was carried away by the NYPD.

Presumably this comes as part of Occupy Lincoln Center, which on December 1 held a protest attended by Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson. That night, the Met performed Glass’s opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha. One sign read, according to the LA Times, “Gandhi would be pepper sprayed.” Like the other Occupy actions under the umbrella of Occupy Museums, these protests oppose “cultural institutions that serve the nation’s wealthiest citizens at the expense of the vast majority.” (It doesn’t help that people aren’t being allowed to protest on Lincoln Center’s plaza—apparently, it’s Koch-Blocked. Or that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s media is one of Lincoln Center’s chief funders.)

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I am a lousy singer. Lots of enthusiasm, but little talent. That’s why I like singing in groups. I can participate with enthusiasm and the people listening don’t need to don ear muffs.

Recently, I have had a little video on auto replay on my computer. The production values are not prime time ready. In fact the images are literally shot from the hip on a tiny hidden camera (I know I should not sound so awed, but at a time when most people have little cameras on their cellphones or smart devices—I am so behind the times that my spellchecker still wants to turn the word cellphone into cellophane). The action opens at the beginning of a foreclosure auction in a typical courtroom—this one at the State Supreme Court in downtown Brooklyn. People are sitting in the benches and up front a woman sits behind a low bench and begins the process of selling someone’s home—a building on Fulton Street being foreclosed by a company with a money-dream name of Instant Capital.

And then a rupture in business as usual—voices; not of auctioneers or buyers or gavel-whackers, but of people. They implore, they entreat, they demand, they sing:

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This summer, as I was sipping coffee with a friend in downtown Guatemala City, I was introduced to a news reporter who agreed to take me with him as he visited murder sites. The next day I arrived at his office at 6 a.m. and immediately we received our first call: a young man with signs of torture had been shot and thrown down a ravine, his hands and feet tied. In the next thirteen hours, we received twelve such calls.

Guatemala is nowadays one of the most violent countries in Latin America, with an average of 45 murders per 100,000 people each year. (By comparison, the homicide rate in the US stands at about 5 per 100,000 and in Mexico it was 22 per 100,000 last year). Most of these murders are attributed to gang violence, especially males. This notion is supported by continuous reports of the brutality of gang violence and by the fact that 90% of the people murdered were males under the age of 29. Indeed, male youth in Guatemala are committing atrocious acts of violence, but blame now falls indiscriminately upon all youth. Tattoos, piercings and a fashion style that looks very much like US rap artists, are now considered the “markers” of violence. As a result, the youth in Guatemala suffer from a dangerous stigmatization that places them in a vulnerable position when confronted by the police and angry mobs. This prevents many of them from making their way into society and fails to acknowledge that these youth are victims to violence themselves. Moreover, it encourages police to use brutality with impunity and promotes a disregard for the legal process.

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The end has to start somewhere. That’s what brought A Ride Till the End’s Jacob George, Jerrad Hardin, and Russ Ritter to Bluestockings bookstore on New York’s Lower East Side yesterday, with their luggage-laden bikes in the back. For the next few weeks, they’ll be making their way down to Washington, D.C. on a Bikes Not Bombs Bicycle Tour, arriving in time for the planned occupation of Freedom Plaza that will mark the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, they’ll be a mobile speakers bureau and art collective, telling their stories in public and playing music, and raising money (in conjunction with Bikes Not Bombs up in Boston) to provide bikes for returning war vets who want to ride. At the heart of what they’re doing is a call for peace and, through it, a means of healing.

You can join them. I hope I will be able to. But in the meantime, you can listen to the whole Bluestockings event, including songs and stories from George’s recent return to Afghanistan with Voices for Creative Nonviolence, here:

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